ings that it arrests attention as worthy of special remark. More than once he alludes to the difficulty of the subject, the mystery which enshrouds it, the inadequacy of language to express such exalted realities. He still believes in endeavoring to discover what the voice of reason teaches upon these things; but revelation is the surest guide, and to what Scripture teaches he devotes the remainder of the treatise.

The

As we follow him here, it is apparent that he is still within the circle of his own reason and cannot go beyond it. He lays down the principles on which he proposes to interpret Scripture, but these principles he has first derived from reason. result is that Scripture adds nothing to the argument: it offers only a large and varied field of illustration. He is more particularly impressed with the familiar phrase so common in the Old Testament, that God's providence in the world is manifested for His name's sake. To the study of this phrase the name of God as the end of the divine activity he devotes two sections of his treatise. But he does not get beyond the theology of the Old Testament in studying the mystery of the divine name. God's name's sake is simply His own sake, and His name is identical with His glory. There is a moment, however, when he seems to stand on the eve of a great transition. He remarks: "I might observe that the phrase the glory of God is sometimes manifestly used to signify the second person in the Trinity. But it is not neces

THE ETERNAL CHRIST.

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The

sary at this time to consider that matter." point whose consideration might have relieved him from his perplexity he passes over as irrelevant. He passes over the momentous fact that while it is God's name's sake in the Old Testament, it is the name of Christ that gives significance to the new dispensation. It is strange that he should not have recalled in this connection how the prayers of the Christian church in every age had been offered in the name of Christ, till the formula had almost come to be regarded as an essential ending to all petitions. So prominent has been the name of Christ during the Christian ages that, unless there be some eternal organic unity of Christ with God which rests in the very nature of the divine Being, it would seem as if God had been robbed of His glory by One whose special mission it was to proclaim and honor Him, whose meat and drink it was to do the will of Him that sent Him.

In passing over all that the name of Christ implies as not essential to his argument, Edwards rejected the aid which would have saved him from confusion and failure. In the doctrine of the Trinity lay the resolution of the problem he was considering. If the doctrine means anything at all, it must mean everything when discussing the last end of God in the creation. It is of Christ that St. Paul remarks that for Him are all things, as well as by Him, and that in Him all things consist. Because Edwards did not recognize the bearings of this doctrine, he is driven to conceive the

motive of God in the end of things as a selfish one. In this treatise, as in his Nature of True Virtue, the apparent effect is to glorify an infinite and celestial selfishness. It is true that God seeks His own glory, and is Himself the final end of His creation. But this truth must in some way be counterbalanced by the equally essential truth that God also exists for another, and in existing for another, and seeking the glory of another, most truly exists for self and realizes His own peculiar glory. It has been admirably remarked, as a summary of the question at issue, that the divine nature demands, in the eye of thought, either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Otherwise the idea of God becomes impossible. Edwards, one is

forced to believe, must have come face to face with the dilemma; but again he is silent where speech was demanded. He had recoiled from deism, as if it were the negation of God. But, if we take this treatise as it stands, he cannot save himself from being wrecked on the opposite shore, — some form of pantheism, which, while seeming to honor the divine name, does so in appearance only, and equally with deism endangers the divine reality. He may have struggled to escape, though he makes no sign, as he approached the dangerous pass, the Scylla and Charybdis of all human speculation on the nature of God.

The speculative treatises at which we have been glancing were written in rapid succession, under the heavy pressure of the cares of life and amid

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the weakness of declining strength. Until recent years it was by these works alone that Edwards was known as a philosophical theologian. In the opinion of his literary executors, as they may be called, Dr. Samuel Hopkins and the younger Edwards, these works included his final convictions. But we have seen that in this treatise on the Last End of God in the Creation, he had struck some difficulty which he makes no attempt to solve. It is pathetic to find him bemoaning the difficulty and the mystery of his theme. He had flung himself into the infinite abyss confident that a way through the pathless void led up to God. But his later unpublished writings, as we are told, abound in confessions of a sense of the mystery of things. Had his thought, so far as he had completed it, found full expression in these four treatises we have been reviewing, it must be admitted that his work as a speculative thinker had ended in confusion, if not in failure. In all these treatises there is seen the tendency to one common conclusion,

that nothing exists but God: Ilis existence, being infinite, must be equivalent to universal existence. By a downward movement from God, humanity as well as the whole realm of nature are swooped up by the sole activity of the one universal will. But Edwards had not attained a position in which he could rest, securely poised amid the winds and storms that agitate the atmosphere of human thought. He had come to the final question which the mind can ask regarding God and His relation to the world, and was not satisfied with the answer.

As disturbances in the motion of the spheres are said to have suggested the possibility of an undiscovered planet, and even led to the calculation of its size and place, so the perturbations of Edwards' thought point to some supreme object of interest and inquiry, of which no traces are to be found in his collected works, in regard to which his literary executors were silent, and over which his biographer has drawn a deeper veil of obscurity by seeming to give a complete survey of his career. That subject was no other than the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

VI.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY.

FOR a long time, possibly so far back as the last century, there has existed a suspicion, under whose various forms there was a common substance, that in Edwards' writings there existed a "tentative" element which did not express his final conviction. No student of Edwards' collected works can proceed very far with their examination without feeling that he wrote, at times, more for the purpose of relieving his own mind than for the edification of the reader. In his solitary life, excluded from the company of his equals, and shut out from much of the highest literature, he became accustomed, as it were, to thinking aloud, a feature of his works which does not lend to their elegance of